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Get Britain building again. Get the country growing again. Clamping down on waste. Making Britons better off…
The funny thing about the messages coming from Rachel Reeves in her party conference speech today is that she is standing four-square in territory dominated by the Conservative Party only a few years ago.
She wants to unblock the planning system, making it easier for energy companies to build wind turbines, solar panels and gigafactories.
She also wants to try to encourage more housebuilding.
Even as she does so, she’s promising to keep an “iron grip” on the public finances and to introduce measures to prevent big projects from overrunning their budgets.
Back when Boris Johnson was the prime minister, this was, almost letter for letter, Conservative policy.
Today’s conference speech underlines how much the Labour Party has shifted since the era of Jeremy Corbyn.
There were some bits and pieces of policy there: the undertaking to reform the planning system, the creation of a kind of “star chamber” to scrutinise spending on big infrastructure projects, not to mention an attempt to recoup some of the spending on consultants and corruption during COVID-19.
Tramlines of next election coming into focus
But as is invariably the case with conference speeches, this was more about messaging than policy.
And the message the Labour Party wanted to get across was that people should be able to trust Rachel Reeves with their money.
However, just as interesting as what the speech told you about the Labour Party is what it told you about the Conservatives.
The party which once occupied this very same territory under Boris Johnson has now dramatically changed its economic messaging.
Last week at the Conservative conference in Manchester, most of the emphasis from Jeremy Hunt was about retrenching government spending.
It wasn’t just the cancellation of HS2’s northern leg; the biggest new announcement in the chancellor’s speech was a freeze in civil…
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